In June 2025, memes circulated online spreading the claim that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally had paid more taxes than Amazon, General Motors, IBM and Netflix combined during the previous year. This version was posted on X:
(X user @ennui365)
A Facebook post shared a slightly different version of the claim, adding in the caption that undocumented immigrants had paid almost $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022:
As of this writing, the post had gained 7,000 reactions and 14,000 shares. Variations of the meme appeared elsewhere on Facebook, with one posted by the Occupy Democrats account that had garnered 19,000 reactions and 7,300 shares — though these posts only included the first sentence of the meme and no further context in their captions.
Snopes was able to identify the 2024 study on which the memes based their claims, "Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants." By comparing the conclusion of this study to the combined 2022 tax bill of the four companies mentioned, we determined that the claim was correct.
In 2024, an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit think tank on taxation that describes itself as nonpartisan but has been deemed liberal by others, concluded that in 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed a total of $96.7 billion in local, state and federal taxes (including for Social Security and Medicare). This included $7 billion in personal and business income taxes and $37.3 billion in state and local taxes.
It is a well-documented fact that immigrants residing in the U.S. without authorization do pay taxes. As the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that promotes bipartisanship, explained in 2018, such immigrants can and do contribute taxes even though they don't have Social Security numbers. They can instead use Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers. In fact, they contribute to safety-net schemes such as Social Security, food assistance programs, Medicare or Medicaid, and cash assistance, but often cannot benefit from them, meaning they help fund these programs for those who reside here legally.
Taxes these companies paid in 2022
Taxes of publicly traded companies are public record. Snopes was able to find details of their tax bills for that year.
In 2023, Amazon published a news release stating it had paid a total of $13.1 billion in income and payroll taxes in 2022. The statement included a breakdown as follows: